Job Title : CTO

Organization : BMJ Group

Sharon Cooper, CTO at medical information specialist the BMJ Group, has worked in digital product development in the publishing industry since its infancy with CD-ROMs and early online tools.

From September 2007, Cooper was director of strategy and innovation for UK government website Directgov. During her tenure, traffic rose from four million users per month to 35 million.

She led a team designing and implementing the first APIs for Directgov, opening up access to the content, and added comment functions to help create public engagement and feedback on the site’s usability.

Cooper’s team also introduced user-centred design into Directgov and other departments, which has led to improvements to a number of government transactions.

Having transferred with the team in 2011 as deputy director government and agency transformation at the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service, she left in July 2012.

In the short time Cooper has been at BMJ Group, she has identified a number of key challenges. These include harnessing data about customers and focusing development on delivering fundamental improvements to products.

She also wants to build on the existing open-source technology behind a number of customer-facing products, and improve digital engagement.